2:21AM
Tom Alerts
Saturday, April 1, 2006 at 2:21AM A couple of hit-and-runs:
1. Joel Turnipseed, author of "Baghdad Express: A Gulf War Memoir", reviews "Planet of Slums" for the Star Tribune. At the end he writes:
readers of Robert Kagan's "Imperial Grunts" or Thomas P.M. Barnett's "The Pentagon's New Map" will get a first-hand look at the teeming locales that will challenge state and international authority.
"Planet of Slums" sounds like a 228 page wallow in the muck of urbanization. Does his commoditization of despair trump Tom's vision for connections to globalization that can raise the tide for all boats?
2. Defense Industry Daily's Perspectives on Technology & Transformation links Tom's review of Chet Richard's "Neither Shall the Sword".
Reader Comments (3)
Disastrous cities are disasters because they are badly governed, for starters. Read Hernando de Soto for tips on what to do. Give people property rights. Make them owners not squatters. People are not rodents, they have two hands and a brain to work, if they are dealt into the game. Read Prahalad. The poor people are workers and customers waiting to happen, and profitable businesses can be run serving their needs. The rich countries could come up with some things to help like cheap and effective medicine against malaria and cheap technology to clean and desalinate water. The existing trends only get to disaster if nothing good happens in the meantime. That is not a necessary outcome.
No No No! It's Robert -Kaplan's- "Imperial Grunts"
Reading anything by Mike Davis is certainly a "wallow" in self-superior egotism.